Three chairs for David Quantick’s Showbiz Pals
2015: Selfie Destruction
2015 saw a tense standoff for the title between two greats of the game come to a dramatic conclusion…
Let’s first round things off. There was on the final day a hit, a miss and a lost pick. The hit was actor Wayne Rogers, best known for his role as Alan Alda’s wingman ‘Trapper’ John McIntyre in the TV classic ‘M*A*S*H’. He was later a regular on ‘Murder She Wrote’ with Angela Lansbury. He died aged 83 and was a hit for the ‘M*A*S*H’-themed team Not Fade Away…
That brought a total of 239 hits, 8 shy of last year’s record. For a while, it looked as if the record was on, but a relatively barren back-end of the summer saw it’s chances diminish. The miss was the troubled daughter of the legendary Nat King Cole, Natalie and she was one of many misses in 2015, as we’ll see later. Unfortunately for two teams, the voice of Bobba Fett, Jason Wingreen, who died on Christmas Day, didn’t get the required UK obit in time (always a dicey time to get on with time running out, post Xmas) to make it a round 240 for the year. Them’s the breaks…
Threepeat for Quantick
..and as a demonstration of the whims of fortune David Quantick’s Showbiz Pals won the DDP for an unprecedented third consecutive year in dramatic (and one might say fortunate) circumstances. It was the US team Thomas Jefferson Survives who set the pace in the early months, racking up 11 hits in four months. But the hits dried up and TJR had to settle for bronze. In September, three time champion The Living End took the lead and for a while, it looked as if he was on for a record 4th title. However there was a mounting sense that there would be one more twist, with it being so tight and so it proved – never write off DQSP! Always in touch with the leaders (effectively a three horse race throughout the year), the reigning champion once again timed a late run to perfection, with a little bit of luck (But hey, if you don’t pick the numbers, you don’t win the lottery!). Bollywood star Sadhana Shivdasani popping off on Xmas Day to give Quantick & Co the bonus needed to wrestle the title out The Living End’s grasp with just a week to go. It was the latest change in leadership since Deathlist.net’s win 2004 and the shortest margin of victory since the present points system was introduced, just the two points…
Red-Flagged bagged the Theme Team League Prize.
Hits and misses…
I mentioned Natalie Cole earlier. She was one of a plethora of notable misses. Not surprising really as with over 3,000 picks every year, there’s bound to be a few that slip down the crack when the next year comes along. Other misses include rugby legend Jonah Lomu, BBC presenter Peter Dimmock, wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, kitsch composer James Last, art snob Brian Sewell, jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, footballer Dave Mackay and new romantic Steve Strange amongst many others. Then there were the ones we never thought of in the first place: pools winner Viv Nicholson, Disney actor Dean Jones, former Miss Marple Geraldine McEwan, novelist Jackie Collins, ventriloquist Keith Harris, singer Errol Brown and film director Wes Craven etc, etc. But never mind the misses, what about the hits? Though shy of the record, 2015 was still a pretty solid year but when we get to brass tacks, some teams were left frustrated. The Drop Forty for example only had 4 hits and only 4 teams notched over 10 hits, just the one last year despite there being close to 500 hits in the last two years. Picks of the year include Christopher Lee, Cilla Black, B. B. King, former Chancellors Denis Healy & Geoffrey Howe, Mr Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, George Cole, “Chat-show Charlie” Kennedy, Nicholas Winton, Peter O’Sullevan, Maureen O’Hara, Warren Mitchell and in the final knockings, Jimmy Hill and Lemmy from Motörhead. That’s a rum set of passengers on the plane, then…
Into 2016…
2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Derby Dead Pool. Amazing eh? And as a special treat, the one and only Big Iain, the creator of the DDP, has returned to the fold! There’s something to keep you all going with until the new set of teams are up. There does remain a slight uncertainty over future of the website as the actual web host Madasafish (which Big Iain subscribed to for nothing back in 2000) will be swallowed up by a bigger fish (Plusnet) in just a few days, leaving the position of the site hanging in the air! This includes the email facility as well, so keep your collective fingers crossed and hopefully nothing awkward will happen…
Written by The Man in Black on 3rd January 2016.